The shock of violence, the uncertainty of memory, and the jagged path of healing are the skillfully braided strands of "The Other Side," Lacy M. Johnson's poetic, harrowing new memoir about an abusive — and very nearly deadly — relationship.

When Johnson is 19 and in college, she falls in love with a Spanish teacher twice her age. Charismatic and cosmopolitan, he "offers all that I didn't know I wanted, asks in return for all that I haven't yet learned how to give." He — referred to only as The Man I Live With — cooks her beautiful meals, slow-dances her around their apartment, and spirits her away to Europe.

But the abuse begins early. In Spain, after an argument, he storms out of their hotel room; when he returns, "[h]e lifted me from the bed so gently, so lovingly, it seemed. I thought he was going to apologize. Instead, he put me on the floor." In Mexico, he calls Johnson a whore while smashing her head against the bed.

Why she doesn't leave him after the first bruise, rather than two years later, is a question Johnson doesn't explicitly answer; the complicated intimacies of an abusive relationship aren't her concern in this volume. Her project, instead, is a stark but lyrical accounting of the aftermath of overwhelming terror: on July 5, 2000, the Spanish teacher, now her ex, kidnaps her, imprisons her in a soundproof room, and rapes her. Afterwards, he tells her he's going out for a drink (to establish an alibi, he explains), and that when he comes back, he will kill her.

Johnson manages to escape. And so begins a longer, more diffuse nightmare, and the formidable struggle to recover from the experience. "Sometimes I feel like a very small person," she writes. "Like I barely fit around the space of a breath. I don't speak because I think no one will hear me." Years later, she remembers how her ex killed their ailing cat. And later still, she admits that "[i]f I sleep, he brings a gun into my dreams."

Johnson's writing feels simultaneously raw and controlled; her narration both linear and associative; her grasp of personal history at once unsettled and unshakeable. The paradoxical nature of the narrative seems to extend to Johnson herself, at least for some: the "old ladies" at the grocery store "see me, my tattoos, my beautiful, well-fed children, and can't process. Old men say things like Why would you go and ruin yourself like that?"

If Johnson writes glancingly of post-kidnapping partying and casual sex, her attention is equally brief on her achievements: her acceptance to one graduate school, and then a second, the prestigious University of Houston's Creative Writing Program, where she earned her PhD.

What is important, what must be recounted again and again and examined from all angles, is the man's brutal act and its rippling aftereffects: "There's the story I have, and the story he has, and there is a story the police have in evidence. There's the story the journal root for the paper. There's the story the female officer filed in her report: her story is not my story .... There's the story you'll have after you put down this book. It's an endless network of stories. The story tells me who I am. It gives me meaning. And I want to mean something so badly."

Johnson's book means something profound. It's not always easy to read, but nor should it be. And what's remarkable is that a person who knows so much about being terrified — most recently, that her ex will come and murder her at one of her readings — can write a book so fearless.

Readings: Johnson reads at 8 p.m. July 13 at the Tin House Writers Workshop in the Cerf Auditorium at Reed College, 3203 S.E. Woodstock Blvd.; and at 7:30 p.m. July 20 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.